I’ve spent a good part of the last few weeks writing emails to support direct mail appeals. As part of this, I pulled together a whole lot of results from various email campaigns – both my own and others – from various sources.

I’ve found a lot of results have been contradictory. I suspect this is the case for several reasons. These include how the donor email address was acquired and different levels of donor engagement. The quality of email content. What else the donor has been receiving via email. The list goes on.

If you don’t know about Gmail tabs then in a nutshell the concern is this.

All those beautifully crafted fundraising emails you send out to your donors with Gmail addresses will end up under a "Promotions tab".

What the heck is the Promotions tab?

In May this year, Google introduced a new tabbed layout. If your donors use Gmail addresses then they can enable up to five tabs. They are Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. If enabled, Gmail automatically sorts all incoming messages into those tabs.

And the fear is that your fundraising emails will be less likely to ...